We know what microwaves do: not much. As long as the emissions remain below a level that causes localized heating, they don't cause problems.

So with all that in mind, is the barrier to selling a lot of supersonic jet tickets really the sonic booms? The Concorde didn't go under because it was annoying too many transatlantic tanker crews with sonic booms. I may not be fully informed, but this seems like a dumb business plan if you are just trying to solve the audio problem.

The sonic-boom problem locked the Concorde out of most of the really long-haul runs: things like Europe-West Coast US, Asia-East Coast US, and Anywhere->Chicago/Atlanta. New York-London in two hours versus six hours isn't much of an advantage; New York-Tokyo in four hours rather than fourteen is huge.

A solar-powered electric car is an attractive idea, but the numbers don't actually work out.

Let's assume a best-case scenario: 100% efficient panels on a car that manages to somehow combine the roof area of a full-sized van with the aerodynamics of a Model S. A solar panel facing directly into the sun produces 1 kW per square meter, so the 10 square meters of panels on your roof are producing a constant 10 kW. Feed that into a Model S's 32 kWh per 100 miles, and you get a sustainable speed of around 30 mph with the sun directly overhead. Now, aerodynamic effects are non-linear, so your actual sustainable speed is probably around 40-45 mph, but still not impressive.

And that's with unrealistically idealistic assumptions. The Model S looks like it's got maybe 3-4 square meters of non-window surface. Coat that with the best panels a lab has ever produced (46% efficient) and de-rate by a factor of 2 to deal with real-world solar incidence angles, and you're looking at a power supply of 1 kW or so, giving a sustainable speed of perhaps 5 mph. Hey, it beats walking.

These aren't "apps".

These are things like the bespoke industrial-control software running a 50-ton press built in 1943, or an EDM cutter that still thinks it's speaking to an ASR-33 terminal at the other end of its RS-232 cable. These are hardware peripherals that would cost upwards of half a million dollars to replace, where reverse-engineering is nearly as expensive and considerably riskier.

The cost of developing a 16-bit-compatible version of Windows is peanuts next to the cost of upgrading.

I believe the correct response to this is "Challenge Accepted".

"Too-smart-for-their-own-good phones"

It's possible to create a shaped charge occupying part but not all of a laptop's battery compartment. This leaves enough battery to power the laptop for a "turn it on to prove it's a laptop" check, so if you dress it up right, the laptop bomb could theoretically get through security.

Thing is, this shaped charge can't be made very large, because you need to leave room for the truncated battery. If you hold the laptop up against the side of the airplane while detonating it, you might be able to make a hole big enough to bring down the plane. If you detonate the laptop in the middle of the cargo hold, the blast will diffuse itself against the surrounding luggage.

Now, Aviation Herald reports an in-flight battery fire every few weeks. It reports a terrorist attack bringing down an airplane once every decade or so. Given the relative frequencies, I know which threat I'd prefer the TSA protect us against.

Okay, so a Comcast tech is calling to tell you he'll be arriving in half an hour to fix your cable.

How many phone lines do you think a big company like Comcast has? Are you aware that each of those phone lines has its own number? Are you willing to give up the ability to identify business callers, in exchange for being able to reliably identify private callers?

Are you still sure that caller ID masking is a bad thing?

Because "Caller ID" is just a bit of user-controlled data tacked on to the call. Call routing and billing are handled through a different, internally-controlled number.

There are good reasons to do this: consider an office with a hundred phone lines routing into a PBX, and then fanning out to a thousand internal extensions. Each of those phone lines has its own number for billing and routing purposes, and it's unreasonable to expect that office's contacts to memorize all hundred of those phone numbers. Instead, the office PBX can be set up to send out a single, "official" phone number in the caller ID data, so that people just need to remember that calls from 1-800-547-7277 are from the company in question.

Averaged over significant periods of time, heart rate is proportional to breath rate, breath rate is proportional to oxygen consumption, and oxygen consumption is proportional to calories burned. So in theory, starting from heart rate alone, you can measure calorie burn.

The problem is that the constants of proportionality vary from person to person. Further, since the number you're measuring (heart rate) is three steps away from the number you want (calorie burn), errors tend to magnify each other. In practice, any device that calculates calorie burn from heart rate is just making a wild guess.

It also helps that heart-surgery robots are not under continuous attack from organized crime.

Opera's had a "Disable scripts on this page" button in the alert boxes for as long as I can remember.

Twenty-nine years ago, I read about a breakthrough in battery chemistry that would make the common NiCd battery obsolete: the new chemistry had four times the capacity, could stand ten times as many charge-discharge cycles, and had no memory effect.

In the decade and a half that followed, I read about a number of other miracle energy-storage technologies: hydrogen, methane, methanol, and ethanol fuel cells; sodium, zinc, and lithium battery chemistries, and a number of other breakthroughs. None of them ever seemed to turn into an actual product I could buy, though.

I kept following that chemistry I first read about in 1988, seeing it pop up from time to time in uses such as electric vehicles or laptop batteries, but never in a form I could make use of. And finally, in 2003, I was able to go to a store and buy a set of those NiMH batteries to use in my digital camera.

Nuclear power has ramp-up and ramp-down times measured in hours or days. Because of this, it is strictly a baseload power source, just like coal. For peaking power, you need hydro, natural gas, or storage.

(Solar and wind are strange critters from a load-management perspective. They have the response times needed for peaking power, but not the availability.)

I don't know where you're getting $10 from -- the music Pandora's streamed to me over the years would barely fit on a 128GB SD card, and I can't find those for less than $30.